Auto-Login for Checkin Kiosks (Windows and iPads)

Auto-Login for Checkin Kiosks (Windows and iPads)

Have you had your iPad's auto logout because  decided that an update was ready to be downloaded which reset your Safari's auto login preferences for no reason! or your PC decide Internet Explorer is so old it lost its memories and forget its login. If you haven't you probably will.

This solution will allow your CheckIn devices to auto login every time without needing to do any setting up on the device itself except typing in the right URL.

4.Create Shortlink(s) (We have lots of groups of kiosks that need to be tweaked every once in a while but all share the same CheckIn URL settings and shortlinks allow that to be done in one place that updates all kiosks on the next Rock Application Load)

1. Create a Person for Checkin Authentication

We have created a checkin user that has only checkin security and that is it to make sure that if the login information got into the wrong hands it is very limited in what it can do. Create a new Family/Person and give that person a database login. You can use a password manager to store the password and create a cryptic login as you will never need to use the login directly yourself. Give that New Person the `App Check-In Devices` security role that is a built in Rock Security Role.

2. Create your Person Token:

What is a Person Token? A Person Token allows you to create a rckipid parameter that you can pass into the URL to authenticate with. Click Here to learn more about optional config on a Person Token. I suggest installing Lava Tester from the Rock Shop. It is a very valuable tool for any Rock setup. If you have Lava Tester installed go into the tool and choose the Checkin User you created in step one and then type the following into your Lava field: {{ Person | PersonTokenCreate:5256000,null,null }} if you want to do it for 10 years. Adjust the 5256000 number to be the number of minutes you want the Person Token to be active and available to use(Note here that if you have a default set on your global attributes for the number of uses you need to specify a number See here for more info max usages). Then hit the Test Button and you should get a `rckipid` Guid you can use in your URL. copy and paste it somewhere safe.

If you don't have Lava Tester you could do this via an HTML block on a page as it would display the value you need, but you would need to tell it who the Person is before you create the token. An easy way to do that would be to get the Id of the Person by going to the Checkin User's Profile page and getting the Id from the URL, and then you would need to do an {% assign checkin = Id#here | PersonById %}{{ checkin | PersonTokenCreate:5256000,null,null }} it would then print the rckipid in the HTML block when that page loads. Just delete the code after you have done it once so it doesn't keep creating tokens every time the page loads.

3. Add that Person Token to your URL setups

The default checkin url is http://yourserver.com/checkin You can append to that URL many things as explained here in the Rock Documentation on checkin. Another thing you can add is the rckipid to the end of your checkin URL string. For Example:

The above link would give your checkin kiosk the Kiosk Device config of 20 and the login of your checkin user you created. You can now append that rckipid to the end of all your kiosks to have them login for you every time to Rock.

4. Create Shortlink(s)

If you find that you have a group of kiosks that all need the same URL you can create a shortlink and then use the shortlink instead of typing in the really long URL. This also allows you to adjust the URL in one place and change it on every device at the same time (You cannot change the device config in real time... meaning the devices will need to restart the rock application to get any shortlink changes).

See below for a sample configuration

This shortlink would allow you to type in on your ipads check in url https://rock.rocksolidchurchdemo.com/rock-ipad-1 and it would configuring using all of that crazy long URL instead of you having to try and type that thing in manually.